1964–1967 Lyndon Johnson Champions Great Society Becoming president on the death of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson was determined to achieve the reforms his predecessor sought, and more. His immediate priorities were Kennedy’s bills to reduce taxes and to ban discrimination, but he went on to declare “unconditional war on poverty.” By August 1964, President Johnson had secured passage of an Economic Opportunity Act that provided training for the disadvantaged and established community action programs like Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), Job Corps, and Head Start. Following his
DECEMBER 1968 Interstate 405 Completed in Orange County
landslide victory in 1964, Johnson enlarged his vision, embarking on the creation of what he called the “Great Society.” Under his leadership, Congress enacted legislation providing federal funding for education, a Medicare program for the elderly, a Medicaid program for the poor, protection of voting rights, abolition of ethnic and national immigration quotas, subsidies for low income housing, and safety standards for air, water, and transportation. It was the greatest burst of legislative activity since the New Deal.
APRIL, JUNE 1968 Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy Assassinated
1967–1968 Anti-Vietnam War Movement Erupts in the U.S.
The Vietnam War Years
JUNE 1967 Six Day War: Israel Expands Its Area of Control
authorizing them to go on the offensive against the National Liberation Front (also known as the Viet Cong) and their North Vietnamese allies. By 1967 almost a half million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam and the war was costing more than $20 billion a year. SEE FIGURE 54
MARCH, SEPTEMBER 1967
South Coast Plaza & Fashion Island Open
OCTOBER 1966 National Organization for Women (NOW) Founded
SEPTEMBER 1965 Delano Grape Strike Led by Cesar Chavez
APRIL 1966 Baseball’s Angels Come to Anaheim
Figure 54. Third Marine Division leathernecks cross a rice paddy in search of the enemy. Image courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration.
California growers opposed the unionization of farm workers, arguing that perishable crops made them uniquely vulnerable to strikes. An added obstacle to unionizing farm workers was their poverty and lack of organization. Nevertheless, in 1959 the nation’s largest union, the AFL-CIO, took the offensive on the farm-labor front, establishing the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). In 1962 a former migrant farm laborer and organizer named Cesar Chavez, in concert with Dolores Huerta, co-founded an independent union named the National Farm Workers Association, later called the United Farm Workers Association (UFW). In September 1965, when Filipino farm workers and other AWOC members initiated a grape strike in Delano against 33 grape growers, Chavez and the UFW took the lead in supporting them. In the spring and summer of 1966 these workers won a series of victories that set a precedent for the unionization of California’s largest farms. By 1975, Chavez’s United Farm Workers of America had won passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which gave them legal bargaining rights.
MARCH–JULY 1965 U.S. Enters Land War in South Vietnam
OCTOBER 1965 University of California, Irvine Opens
President Kennedy’s commitment to an activist foreign policy led him to take a stand in South Vietnam, where the United States had been trying to stabilize the pro-western regime of Ngo Dinh Diem since the Geneva armistice accords of 1954. During the two and a half years of his administration, Kennedy gradually escalated American aid and the number of United States military advisers from about 700 to more than 16,000. Lyndon Johnson, despite the overthrow of Diem by South Vietnamese military leaders in November 1963, chose to maintain Kennedy’s course in Vietnam, expanding secret raids, boosting economic/military assistance, and increasing the American presence. In February 1965 Johnson initiated a bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and between March and July he sent combat forces into South Vietnam,
SEPTEMBER 1965 Delano Grape Strike Led by Cesar Chavez
MARCH–JULY 1965 U.S. Enters Land War in South Vietnam
THE VIETNAM WAR YEARS
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